Observing the Everyday: Audiovisual Practices and Cultural-Historical Learning in Teacher Education / Observar lo cotidiano: prácticas audiovisuales y aprendizaje histórico-cultural en la formación docente
Ibis M. Alvarez, Natalia Contreras-GonzálezInitial teacher education faces a persistent challenge: helping future teachers use the cultural-historical approach not only to understand child development theoretically but to interpret concrete educational practices. Although this framework offers powerful concepts for analyzing children’s learning and socialization, students often struggle to apply them when observing real situations. This study examines the potential of a multimodal methodology, inspired by visual anthropology, to promote situated learning in teacher education. Using a qualitative, interpretive approach, it analyzes a formative experience involving 143 primary education–degree students at a public university in Barcelona. The proposal combined academic reading, systematic observation of everyday child interactions, visual or audiovisual recording, narrative-argumentative writing, and collective discussion. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted on the multimodal corpus produced by the groups, complemented by open-ended questionnaire responses. Findings indicate that the methodology acted as formative mediation, transforming observation into evidence, writing into conceptual elaboration, and audiovisual editing into reasoned analytical selection. It fostered theory–practice articulation, situated professional vision, and collaborative, ethically informed reflection on visual data involving children.